Once Shushart set the basket down and landed next to it, his three passengers all but fell over each other in their haste to get out of it, practically burying themselves in the dirt and grass with sighs of relief.

  "I don't like the Currents," Raan whined.

  "Don't worry," Shushart assured him. "It's a lot more comfortable when you're flying with them instead of being carried, and in a couple of years you'll be strong enough to fly them with a guide."

  A sheep looked at the three younglings and bleated at them. Normally, of course, any mere beast would instinctively recognise a dragon as an apex predator and avoid them as much as they could. Unbeknownst to the younglings, however, the adults had worked a ritual over the Domain to calm the beasts down. They could learn to hunt things that feared them on sight later; even lesser monsters would not always fear a dragon.

  Kese moved almost before the noise had faded.

  It wasn't a neat pounce like they'd practiced back in the Wellheart.

  It was fifteen hundred pounds of claws, muscle and predatory instinct ploughing into something less than a fifth of her weight and eviscerating it.

  She let out a rumbling purr in satisfaction at her first taste of fresh meat, only briefly looking up with a bloodstained muzzle to see the other two had leapt after the rest of the sheep that had realised that there were predators in their midst. Her tail twitched with the desire to chase. Her stomach grumbled with the desire to keep eating.

  She growled, scarfed down the juiciest parts and shot after the rest of the flock, taking to the air with a beat of her wings that sent her soaring over Raan. He had been more methodical and restrained than her, catching one sheep at a time and looping a limb - or a neck - in his tail before chasing after the next. By the time he had run out of tail to hold them with, the earlier ones were looking somewhat less sheep-shaped, but that didn't bother him.

  Kese took his idea and ran with it - or rather, flew with it, collecting a sheep in each paw and one in her tail before flapping her way back to Raan, dropping her burdens practically on top of him before settling down next to him to tuck into the buffet.

  Shushart shook his head as he watched the duo, amused by their antics. Apome had managed a more 'normal' hunt by the standards of the younglings, catching a half-dozen sheep and finding them too heavy to drag back to the other two, and so simply going from carcass to carcass, ripping aside the annoying wool to get at the tasty flesh beneath.

  He was young enough to still remember his own first hunt. The delight in the younglings' eyes as they gorged themselves made him a little hungry, and he was tempted to snatch up a sheep or two for himself. He refrained - mostly because the flesh of a mere beast carried so little energy that any Coalesced stage dragon like him could've eaten the entire flock without it being anything more than a snack, if that.

  To distract himself, he pushed mana into his core, letting tiny gusts flow from his wings and whip through the vicinity, seeking out something a little more challenging for the hatchlings than sheep.

  He found a few options - no real surprise when he suspected much of the prey here had been donated by adult dragons as a treat for the younglings - tail twitching as he considered for a moment.

  One option was a beast that he doubted the three could bring down. That didn't exclude it - they would need the lesson sooner rather than later that they were not the strongest creatures out there - but it did compel him to put it at the bottom of the list.

  Another was a pack of predators, likely the apex of this Domain until the dragons had descended. Two dozen beasts with pack tactics and powerful jaws...that was something to avoid entirely, at least unless his trio met up with another group or two.

  The amphibian beasts were also to be avoided - they would be next to no threat if caught outside of the water, but if they could startle one of the younglings and get them into the water, that would suddenly become more dangerous than he was willing to risk.

  The gusts that had wended their way into the forest found a duo of sleeping beasts. Shushart bared his fangs in a grin. Now that was a challenge worthy of the Bloodborn and the abnormal strength of the sun-forsaken youngling.

  He let them finish their meals first, of course. It would take far more than a flock of sheep to put a dent in the appetites of three young dragons.

  "I hope you aren't expecting all your hunts to be that easy," he grinned, padding towards them. Apome wriggled her way between Kese and Raan to browse the bloody mass of wool the two had left for any leftovers.

  "That wasn't a hunt," Kese scoffed. "That was barely harder than eating what the adults give us in Wellheart."

  "Oh? You'd like to hunt something a little more challenging?"

  "How much more challenging?" Apome asked, as Kese and Raan perked up excitedly.

  "I want to!" Raan declared, and Kese nodded enthusiastically.

  Apome looked noticeably less enthusiastic, perhaps regretting her eager decision to join Raan and Kese. Shushart wondered if she'd chosen to come with the duo in the hopes of getting to eat prey she wouldn't have been able to hunt alone.

  Raan flicked her with his tail. "Come on! You were practicing all that pouncing! You should be great at this!"

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  "Where are we going - Senior?" Kese asked, remembering the proper etiquette at the last minute, not that they were obliged to follow it until they came of age.

  "Into that forest," he said, pointing with his tail. "Hope you three are up for a walk."

  The walk took the better part of an hour - mostly because Shushart deliberately led them a circuitous route, following the beasts' tracks rather than where the wind guided them to. He was pleased to note that the three younglings realised what he was doing and started following the tracks themselves before they found the beasts. The tracks weren't hard to follow, of course, but some younglings didn't understand the idea for their first few hunts.

  Once they got close enough, he let the winds catch the sounds and scents of their approach so the three younglings could plan their attack without alerting the beasts early.

  "What...is that?" Apome whispered, staring wide-eyed at the mass of fur.

  "It's a....burr? Bar? No, bear." Kese's tail flicked happily when she got a nod of confirmation from Shushart.

  "Two bears," Raan corrected her, nodding to where the pile of fur changed colour slightly.

  "How are we supposed to hunt that? They're bigger than you!"

  "No they aren't!" he protested, drawing himself up to look down at Apome. "Besides, they're just beasts. We're dragons," he said, proudly.

  "Didn't you listen to what Tender Jinwirys said?" Kese scolded him. "Some beasts are dangerous to younglings."

  "Some beasts might be, but these are just big balls of fur!"

  The younglings looked over to Shushart, who offered them an idle shrug. "Oh, this is all you. Like your Tender said, I'll stop you getting seriously hurt. That's all."

  "Okay..." Kese frowned at the two bears. "Raan, you fight the big one. Apome, you and I fight the smaller one so we can get rid of it quickly and help Raan."

  Raan beamed delightedly at being given the bigger bear to fight, pawing eagerly at the ground. And then, once the other two were ready, he stepped forwards and howled a challenge at the bears.

  The bears responded immediately at the sound of a predator in their territory, the bigger bear lumbering to its feet and letting out a roar of its own.

  "Oh, it is bigger than me," Raan acknowledged, taking it slightly more seriously, crouching to spring and flicking out his claws.

  "Thank you for hiding us, Senior," Kese said, before she and Apome slipped off to the side, circling around the bears' lair to encircle the smaller bear.

  Shushart chuckled at getting found out. "Smart youngling," he commented, settling down to watch the fight.

  Raan made the first move, charging right at the bigger bear without any trace of strategy. It reared up, swung a heavy paw at him and landed a solid hit on his jaw that would have smashed most younglings into the dirt. Raan stumbled, but he still slammed into the bear - and discovered that it was not, in fact, a ball of fur, but rather a ball of muscle with a thin layer of fur over it.

  Maybe if it had been on all fours it would have been able to hold its ground against the impact. Unbalanced with only its hind legs for support, though, Raan's tackle - even hampered as it was by the blow to the head he'd suffered - was enough to knock it down. He shook his head to clear it and leapt at the bear again.

  As the noise of battle broke out behind them, Apome and Kese erupted from the undergrowth and pounced on the smaller bear - though 'smaller' was still relative, as the beast was bigger than either of them. Apome tried to mimic Raan's charge, and succeeded in attracting its attention, but though the bear stumbled back from the force of her charge, it didn't fall, and rounded on her as she squeaked in alarm.

  Before it could do anything more than turn on her, Kese leapt, landing on the bear's back and digging her claws in. It roared in protest and rose up, trying to crush her against a tree, but she leapt away, clinging to the tree and then using it as a platform to launch herself straight back at the bear, the force of her charge added to her weight too much for the bear to withstand. Its shoulder cracked under the impact and it crashed onto its side.

  Kese lunged for its neck, but a roar of pain caught her attention before she could finish the fight. The bigger bear, despite having a half dozen vicious wounds from Raan's claws, had caught one of Raan's forelimbs in its mouth. He was too heavy for it to lift him completely off the ground, but it had pulled him up to his hind legs by the trapped limb as it bit down with enough force to punch through his scales. He slammed his wings into its mouth, hooking his wing-talons onto its jaws and wrenching them apart, dropping to the ground and whipping around to slam his tail into its hind legs with enough force to break the bone. A beat of his wings brought him slamming into the bear's chest as it fell and he ripped out its throat with an angry snarl before it could recover, crashing to the ground with him on top of it as its blood covered the clearing and Raan roared in satisfaction. He'd suffered a few scratches from its claws aside from the bite to the foreleg, but they were all - even the bite - fundamentally minor wounds.

  A few minor wounds and he'd killed something bigger than he was that was ready for him - before the combined strength of two younglings had been able to bring down a lesser beast that they'd surprised.

  Not that that was an entirely fair comparison, Shushart reflected. Apome's contribution to the hunt of the smaller bear had been her first initial charge, which had done little more than distract the bear. After that, she'd done little more than dance nervously around it while Kese swarmed over it like a tide of claws and fangs as the bear tried and failed to dislodge something heavier and stronger than it was.

  Apome's actions, ironically, were more what he'd expected from three younglings trying to fight a duo of bears. He'd even prepared to make a dramatic intervention if they were in danger, a hundred leaves animated by his mana hovering around and ready to descend and rip the two bears to shreds. For Raan and Kese to defeat the two bears more or less on their own - entirely on their own, in Raan's case - was an undeniably impressive feat.

  And while Raan had indeed fought a more powerful specimen, Kese hadn't suffered a single wound in the process - not that you'd know that from the amount of blood on her. Raan clearly thought she'd been hurt, nosing at her worriedly until he realised that all the blood was bear blood and not dragon blood, making her laugh. He glared at her and then tried to cover for his concern by licking the blood off her shoulder and pronouncing "My bear's tastier."

  His own wounds had already stopped bleeding. Even at the Mortal stage, dragons could recover from minor wounds like this in a few seconds - though Raan's quick reactions were the only reason the bite was a minor wound. Had he lost his composure the bite could have broken bone.

  Raan and Kese eagerly tucked in to their new kills. Apome shifted uncomfortably, well aware that she'd done practically nothing to bring down her bear, but Raan caught her with his tail when she got too close to him and hauled her closer to the point that her muzzle was practically squashed against the bear's corpse until she gave in and started eating as well, purring delightedly.

  Apome's nervousness at facing a stronger foe was something she would have to work on, but Shushart was never going to criticise her for that on her first hunt - it wasn't as though she'd turned and run, after all. But if Kese and Raan were an indication of the calibre of the younglings the Span had been blessed with, then the future was bright indeed.